Prisoner 1082
Escape from Crumlin Road, Europe’s Alcatraz
Dónal Donnelly.

On St Stephen’s Day 1960 Dónal Donnelly made his dramatic escape from the prison known as ‘Europe’s Alcatraz’. Using hack-saw blades, torn sheets and electric flex, Dónal broke out of Crumlin Road Prison, running the gauntlet of searchlights, alarms and machine-gun nests. Three years earlier, the teenage Dónal had been convicted of membership of the IRA in the first year of ‘Operation Harvest’. He was sentenced to ten years. This is the story of how he overcame many hurdles to live a successful, happy life.

978-1848890312

PB
224 pp
198 x 128 mm
€12.99/£11.99
March 2010
B&W photos

Privilege & Poverty
The Life and Times of Irish Painter and Naturalist Alexander Williams RHA (1846-1930)
Gordon T. Ledbetter.

Alexander Williams was the first artist to open the West of Ireland to a broad audience. His life was extraordinarily wide-ranging. A landscape painter, he was also an apprentice hatter, a taxidermist and a professional singer. Illustrated with a wide selection of his work, this biography illuminates the diversity of his life and times with material found nowhere else.

978-1-84889-034-3

Biography/Irish Art
HB
440 pp
246 x 174 mm
€40.00/£35.99
NOT YET PUBLISHED: Due in August 2010

Gordon has set up a website to whet your appetite for all things Williams! Click here for more information.

Now Available

Stone Mad
Seamus Murphy.

Illustrations by William Harrington

This account of time spent as an apprentice stonecarver is an acclaimed Irish classic. The young Seamus Murphy took the unusual step of apprenticing himself to a master stonecarver to learn the ancient craft of the mason. Stone Mad tells the story of his seven years of growing knowledge, of the challenges and joys of stone – and of the men who worked it. The result is a book of unsurpassing beauty, full of warmth, humour and profound perception.

ISBN-10: 1-903464-81-1
ISBN-13: 978-1903464816

PB
240pp
216 x 138mm
€12.95/£9.99
March 2010

Talking to Kate
Tom Nestor.

In this uplifting memoir, Tom Nestor recounts conversations with his five-year-old grand-daughter, Kate. He shares his experiences and the wisdom that comes with the perspective of years, hoping to instil in Kate his appreciation of the beauty of the natural world, an understanding of life and relationships, and guidance for how Kate and her generation might cope with life’s future trials and tribulations.

978-1905172917

PB
216 pp
198 x 128 mm
€12.99/£11.99
2009

The Fethard-on-Sea Boycott
Tim Fanning.

In 1957, Sheila Cloney, Protestant wife of a Catholic farmer, fled from her home near the Wexford village of Fethard-on-Sea with her young daughters after refusing to bow to the demands of the local Catholic clergy to educate them as Catholics. In response, the priests launched a boycott of Fethard’s Protestant shopkeepers and farmers.

978-1848890329

PB
240 pp
234 x 156 mm
€14.99/£12.99
March 2010
B&W photos

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The Last of the Name Audiobook
Charles McGlinchey as told to Patrick Kavanagh.

Read by Sean McGinley

Charles McGlinchey (1861–1954) lived his entire life on the Inishowen Peninsula in Donegal. Never married, he outlived his brothers and sisters, none of whom left an heir. In the 1940s and ’50s, McGlinchey would visit schoolmaster and friend, Patrick Kavanagh, to talk about his life and times. Kavanagh wrote it down. Thirty years later Brian Friel edited the material to form a book. This is an astonishingly detailed tapestry of life in the north-west of Ireland in a period now beyond the grasp of living memory.

978-1905172542

Audiobook
4 CDs
€27.95/£19.99
2007

The Last of the Name
Charles McGlinchey as told to Patrick Kavanagh.

Edited with an introduction by Brian Friel

Charles McGlinchey (1861–1954) lived his entire life on the Inishowen Peninsula in Donegal. Never married, he outlived his brothers and sisters, none of whom left an heir. In the 1940s and ’50s, McGlinchey would visit schoolmaster and friend, Patrick Kavanagh, to talk about his life and times. Kavanagh wrote it down. Thirty years later Brian Friel edited the material to form a book. This is an astonishingly detailed tapestry of life in the north-west of Ireland in a period now beyond the grasp of living memory.

978-1905172467

PB
160pp
198 x 128mm
€12.95/£9.99
2007

The Unknown Commandant
The Life and Times of Denis Barry 1883–1923
Denis Barry.

Foreword by Cathal MacSwiney Brugha

In size and tone, Denis Barry’s funeral cortege in the midst of a bloody civil war was similar to those that marked the burials of Tomás MacCurtain and Terence McSwiney and, in more peaceful times, of Christy Ring and Jack Lynch. But who was ‘the Unknown Commandant’? A martyr and a hero to his countrymen, Denis Barry is overlooked today. This book seeks to rescue this hugely respected Cork man from relative anonymity. Denis Barry toiled in the shadows of McSwiney and MacCurtain in the tumultuous period of the Irish War of Independence. A brave soldier, patriot and sportsman, hunger strike ended his life at the Curragh Military Prison in 1923 for the cause he believed in.

978-1848890299

PB
256 pp
198 x 128 mm
€12.99/£11.99
April 2010

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